Can he win more than one race in a season for the first time since 2004? Or was the Indy win just another tease by a driver who has had an up-and-down career?

Newman is one of several NASCAR stars with the talent and potential to win consistently and become perennial championship contenders but who always seem to disappoint and come up short.

That’s why Jimmie Johnson has won five Sprint Cup championships and seems poised to win a sixth this season. He is NASCAR’s only driver who is consistently great.

Johnson has been a serious title contender in all but two of his 12 Sprint Cup seasons. But he has rarely been challenged by the same driver year after year.

Each of NASCAR’s greatest champions had perennial contenders to deal with. Richard Petty had David Pearson and Cale Yarborough.

Yarborough had Darrell Waltrip. Waltrip had Dale Earnhardt. Earnhardt had Rusty Wallace, and then Jeff Gordon.

Johnson has had a host of contenders, but none have been consistent enough to challenge him year after year. Instead, most of them challenge for one season and then fade from contention or suffer a few years of disappointment.

These days, the Sprint Cup Series is filled with drivers who leave their fans frustrated, disappointed and wanting more. Drivers who consistently fail to live up to their potential and lofty expectations.

Is it because NASCAR’s top series is more competitive than ever, making it hard for any driver or team to sustain excellence year after year?

Or do those drivers just not have what it takes to be a consistent winner and contender?

He was a consistent winner for the first seven years of his career, producing 17 victories — including a six-win season in 2004 — and finishing a career-high third in the standings in 2003. That early success created false hope that Junior would one day emerge as the type of perennial contender that made his father a seven-time Cup champion.

Yet Junior struggled in his final few years with Dale Earnhardt Inc. and those struggles surprisingly have continued at Hendrick Motorsports.

Though he has made the Chase the past two seasons and is in position to do so again, he has just two wins in six seasons with Hendrick and endured a four-year winless streak.

Though he has emerged as a top-10 driver and Chase contender again, Earnhardt still has trouble winning races and his Hendrick team can’t seem to show enough strength and consistency to become a weekly threat.

Instead, he continues to tease his fans by running just strong enough to give them hope.

Bowyer seems to be a driver who has been on the verge of a breakout season for the past six years.

He finished third in points in just his second full season with Richard Childress Racing and fifth the following year, offering hints that he might become RCR’s next great driver. But Bowyer wound up winning just five races in six seasons with RCR.

Then, after moving to Michael Waltrip Racing, he appeared to have a breakout season last year, winning three races and finishing second in the final standings.

In 2011, he won just one race but was one of the most consistent drivers in the history of the sport, losing the Chase on a tiebreaker to Tony Stewart. Last year, he went winless again, scored just three top-five finishes and fell to 15th in the standings.

He has bounced back somewhat this season, winning one race and sitting third in points after 20 races. But he hasn’t shown the type of consistency that nearly won him the title in 2011.

Edwards has proven that he can win races in bunches. He has proven he can contend for the championship. But he also has three winless seasons and has missed the Chase three times.

He has all the traits to be a champion, but for whatever reason, has not been able to get over the hump and put it all together.

He offered a hint of that in 2008 when he won eight races in his first season with Joe Gibbs Racing. But he has won just 14 races over the past five seasons, including just one Cup race last season.

More surprisingly, he has been a non-factor in the Chase, missing it twice and never finishing higher than eighth in points the past five years.

Busch, 28, still is considered one of the sport’s most talented drivers, but he has given away more Cup races than he has won and often lets his aggressiveness, impatience and temper hinder his performance.

Busch no doubt has many more victories ahead of him — he could reach 200 across all three series — but he has left a lot of doubt over whether he will ever fully realize his potential in Sprint Cup.

Newman finished sixth in points three times from 2002-05, establishing himself as a driver to watch over the next decade.

Instead, while Johnson was winning the next five championships, Newman fell to 18th in points (2006) and went winless in three of the next four years.

In the past eight years, Newman has just five wins and hasn’t finished higher than ninth in points.

Once dubbed “The Rocketman,” Newman has mostly flamed out and failed to realize his potential. Now, with a Brickyard 400 win in his pocket, he is looking to resurrect his career with a new team next season.

When Greg Biffle entered the Sprint Cup Series in 2003, he was chasing history. He was in position to become the first driver to win a championship in all three of NASCAR’s national series.

Now 43, Biffle is running out of time.

Biffle, widely regarded as one of NASCAR’s most talented and aggressive drivers, proved to be a consistent winner early in his Cup career, winning nine races in his first three seasons, including a career-high six in 2005. But that consistency has disappeared in the latter stages of his career.

Biffle finished second in the standings in 2006 and third in 2008. But in between, he missed the Chase twice and again in 2011. He has won seven races in the past six seasons, but has gone winless twice.

Biffle still is regarded as one of the sport’s best drivers and has proven he can win when his team gets his car right, but that happens too infrequently these days.

How can a driver who has four Cup championships and 87 career victories be considered disappointing and frustrating?

Because his Drive for Five has continued for 12 seasons.

Gordon hasn’t won a championship since 2001 and the wins are few and far between these days. Make no mistake, he has had a phenomenal, Hall of Fame-like career and will go down as one of the greatest drivers in the sport’s history, but he has struggled for years to recapture the magic and consistency that made him great.

He has seriously challenged for the championship just twice in the Chase era — 2004 and 2007 — and has struggled just to make the Chase in recent years.

Since his six-win season in 2007 — when he nearly beat Johnson for the championship — Gordon has just six wins and has gone winless twice. He won twice last year, but had to rally to earn a wild card into the Chase, and is in a similar position this year.

Though Gordon is still considered an elite driver, who could have guessed that he would ever become an afterthought among championship contenders?

Hopefully he recaptures some of his early-career magic before putting the finishing touches on a spectacular career.